I miss the Moon. I don't mean for the sake of all the romantic stuff associated with it. Saying to your girlfriend "I'll give you the Moon" became a less attractive offer, when we started using it as a dump. But over all those millennia, it used to enthrall anyone who bothered to look up, and wonder if those things were real "places", that one could actually go to. Why? I think it was because it was the first step off the planet, a platform patiently waiting to be reached, and to be used, to leap into the universe from. I think it was subconscious. I don't mean that serfs in old Russia or gladiators in ancient Rome consciously thought such things. It was just an undercurrent, a hope, a promise of a strange, unimaginable future that one dare not really think about. Look, there it is.... what is it? And if we can get there, what else can we do? Where else could we go? Are we ever going to take that first step?

Something's gone out of humanity since the Moon went. There's less imagination. Hardly anyone wants to train in the sciences anymore. They can see where science got us, or so they think. People keep to themselves more. I know these are subjective impressions, and who really knows the cause, but apparently I think I do, because I'm convinced it was the loss of the Moon. It was always there, and now it's not, and we did it.

Hope you're not as depressed about all this as I am, Stephanie. Say hi to Dad for me. Our team is under pretty heavy pressure to come up with a good, new alternative dumping site so they can start the plants up again (you know, for the anniversary), but I ask you... where would that be, exactly?